[Talk-us] Tagging National Forests

[stevea]

Apologies for length.

Tod Fitch writes:
>...there is little or no logging in the forests in the mountains of 
>Southern California (in or out of the administrative boundaries of 
>the US Forest Service).

I'm not sure you know this to be true:  Cleveland National Forest is 
a big place, publicly owned, and as I make a campfire with downed 
wood, it is a forest.  Its owner (We, the People of the USA) call it 
a forest, where wood is or can be harvested.  This overlaps with our 
wiki definition.  Wood is harvested in our national forests, I think 
it is safe to say "every day."  Me using our wood because it is safe 
to gather it for a fire at our camp is not the same as clear-cutting, 
it is true, but both are on of a spectrum of "owner using a forest to 
harvest wood."

>Yet the OSM wiki says landuse=forest is "For areas with a high 
>density of trees primarily grown for timber." From postings on 
>tagging lists, the timber production seems to be a continental 
>European interpretation and appears to be part of our semantic issue.

Timber production happens in national forests.  No contradiction, 
consistent with USFS polygon tagging of landuse=forest.

>It seems to me that the "landuse=forest" tag should go away. For 
>timber production it ought to be something like "landuse=timber" if 
>it is being used for timber production. The "natural" tag has the 
>implication that mankind has not interfered with the the ecosystem. 
>An area may be scrub or grass covered now because of over harvesting 
>of trees in prehistoric times (Easter Island comes to mind). Is that 
>a "natural" thing or the result of a former human land use?

It is as messy as human history has shaped our planet so it is what 
we have.  We utter tags that mean certain things, we strive to do so. 
We write wiki pages and have conversations about what we mean.  We 
should.

>Landcover strikes me as a much more manageable tag for describing 
>what is on the ground to the average mapper. I see trees, grassland 
>or scrub. I can tag that. It may not be obvious if it is or was at 
>one time actively managed for timber, cattle or watershed so 
>"landuse" and/or "natural" are harder for the citizen mapper to tag.

I have hope for a landcover tag to become useful.  It seems one of 
many good places for these conversations to continue.  Free-form 
tagging can build a beautiful syntax if we are precise.  Consensus 
here appears difficult but possible.

>For US National Forest boundaries, I'd like to see the 
>"landuse=forest" go away because currently implies logging which 
>also implies actually having trees which is often not the case in 
>the US West and Southwest. If an area of a forest is actually used 
>for timber production then it should be so tagged, but to make it 
>clear that forest !== timber, the "landuse=forest" tag ought to be 
>deprecated and replaced with a more specific term.

These are areas which ARE logged (by the casual citizen who builds a 
campfire, an allowed purpose in my/our forest) so it is a forest. 
The implication of logging is muddying, and besides, me picking up 
deadwood in an area owned by the People of the USA and building a 
campfire with it IS logging, in a sense.  A gentle one, yes, but 
logging a forest, yes, too.

It does make sense for a map to show me where I might do this.  This 
is what is meant by a forest, USFSs happen to be more publicly owned 
than a private forest with active logging -- both are forests by our 
wiki definition.  Seeing this accurately is what a map is supposed to 
do.  At least when we are precise when we say what we mean by 
"forest."  Seems we used to do that OK around here.  Then again, 
maybe others notice that some do things differently.  There are many 
ways the whole world can and does get along.

Deprecating landuse=forest seems overly harsh; there are a number of 
meanings with this, some held by many to be a firmly etched semantic 
meaning something important and specific in the real world.  Stomping 
on that is done only at the cost of a firm nose-thumbing of 
conscientious semantic rule-following attention-payers.  It seems 
renderers are part of the consensus loop, even as we say "don't code 
for the renderer."

While recognizing there is a place for improvement, the renderer 
should be a place where "we show what we mean."  It may be correct to 
bring into more public view "next" versions of Standard rendering. 
Now we have "Standard" even as new CSS rules are installed:  an 
active zone where Standard changes (some say improves).  Version 
numbers as we share two (Standard and Newer) might make sense.

The tag natural=wood means something, too:  that these are more 
ancient and untouched trees, distinctly not harvested.  In the real 
world, such a "this" has many names in many localities.  It may be 
private or public ownership.  It might be an area where people 
recreate (especially if public) and/or called a park or preserve or 
monument; sometimes just an "unnamed parcel of trees" (identified 
with this polygon).

We ought to get these many issues sorted out even as it seems 
consensus remains in the distance.  Better developing landcover tags 
is a thrust in a particular direction which I support in concept. 
Please, everybody, let us carry on these conversations.

Anybody else who wishes Martijn to "put 'em back" (to landuse=forest) 
might chime in, I'm not alone.  National forests no longer being 
tagged landuse=forest?  That somehow isn't right.  Not with the 
rendering toolchain as mapnik Standard is expressed today.

I can be convinced with something better and more clear.  For now, we 
have what we have.  (Let's not forget we have free-form tagging, too).

It continues.

SteveA
California